21 Facts About Auslan

Auslan is the majority sign language of the Australian Deaf community.

The term Auslan is a portmanteau of "Australian Sign Language", coined by Trevor Johnston in the 1980s, although the language itself is much older.

Auslan is related to British Sign Language and New Zealand Sign Language ; the three have descended from the same parent language, and together comprise the BANZSL language family.

Auslan has been influenced by Irish Sign Language and more recently has borrowed signs from American Sign Language.

Auslan was recognised by the Australian government as a "community language other than English" and the preferred language of the Deaf community in policy statements in 1987 and 1991.

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In 1982, the registration of the first sign language interpreters by NAATI, a newly established regulatory body for interpreting and translating, accorded a sense of legitimacy to Auslan, furthered by the publishing of the first dictionary of Auslan in 1989.

Auslan evolved from sign language varieties brought to Australia during the nineteenth century from Britain and Ireland.

Auslan had been to a Deaf school there, and was known as a good storyteller in sign language.

In more recent times, Auslan has seen a significant amount of lexical borrowing from American Sign Language, especially in signs for technical terms.

Previously, Auslan had been said to be an OSV, but more recent scholars have said that this idea is a false-equivalent of Auslan with spoken languages and that using anchor signs is not the same as word order.

In general, word order in Auslan takes into account context and fluidity between signs being used, being less rigid than many spoken languages.

Auslan is a zero-copula language, which means that the verb to be is not used at all except when quoting English.

Auslan replaces copula with interrogratives for certain phrase types, sometimes in this context called "rhetorical questions" or "modifiers", using non-manual features to express that it is a statement rather than a question.

The interrogratives of Auslan are more or less direct translations to English ones, with WHY used for this purpose sometimes translated as BECAUSE.

Auslan is a natural language distinct from spoken or written English.

Regardless of their background, many Deaf adults consider Auslan to be their first or primary language, and see themselves as users of English as a second language.

Auslan was introduced to Papua New Guinea, where it mixed with local or home sign and Tok Pisin to produce Papua New Guinean Sign Language.

Sign languages related to Auslan appear to be used in some other parts of the Asia-Pacific, such as in Fiji.

Linguists often regard Auslan as having two major dialects - Northern, and Southern.

Auslan has no widely used written form; in the past transcribing Auslan was largely an academic exercise.

The first Auslan dictionaries used either photographs or drawings with motion arrows to describe signs; more recently, technology has made possible the use of short video clips on CD-ROM or online dictionaries.